Micron, Qualcomm Show Strong AI Demand

25:54We bought Nuvia, and you see now our CPU showing up not only in PCs and phones and automotive, but now in the data center. We bought AlphaWave, and you see us now into the connectivity business and the custom ASIC business. And the modular acquisition is incredibly exciting. I actually don't think the industry investors really understand what that acquisition is. I think my prediction is people are going to read it three or four or five times, and eventually they're going to get it, which is an industry-friendly alternative that we're going to make it available upon close to everybody. So all of those things are - And then that module acquisition, Chris Lattner, he's sticking around?

26:33Absolutely. That's why you can see, if anything, what you should see about this acquisition by being an all-stock deal, it means that the founders are now fully vested on the future of Qualcomm. And I think there's another thing that investors did not understand. They asked me the question, why is this size acquisition doing all stock? It's because they're all now committed to the future of Qualcomm when we're connected together. So all of those things is part of us doing that. And to your question is, there are going to be some other acquisitions, but as we have been very disciplined, as we're building industrial, some of the acquisitions we did, Arduino with 33 million developers, we're focused on industrial, Edge and Pulse.

27:16Now you see us doing data center. Future acquisitions are focused on data center and robotics, which is another area of investment for Qualcomm. Cristiano, smartphone and AI PC is still there for you, right? And you'll be aware of the world that we woke up to this morning in memory with Apple raising prices as well. Has your outlook for the PC and smartphone markets changed or shifted at all for this year, next year? That's a great question. I think you have to look at those markets very short term, and you need to look at this market, so what's happening in the midterm. For the very short term, I think the whole world is dealing with this memory situation right now, which is not great.

28:00And I respect the companies kind of make choice to different industries, but then what happened is you don't have a demand problem. and mobile NPC, you have the memory availability and prices. I think you saw the message from Apple. So we even expect, when we think about, for example, the Android market in China, I think when you think about year over year, when you look at 27, expect it to be flat, to probably a down bias. And that has all to do not with demand, but with the memory situation. But the other part's more interesting. There's a lot of clarity right now because of agents, how this market is going to change with AI.

28:43Very, very clear. And I think we see a lot of those phones now becoming the customers of the phone as the human and the agents. And that is changing the architecture of the devices. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and Bloomberg's Remain Bostic. Fantastic conversation. Thank you both very much indeed.

29:08Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. I'm going to take a look at today's big number, which actually may be our smallest big number yet, sub one nanometer. IBM has unveiled what it calls the world's first sub one nanometer chip technology, squeezing nearly 100 billion transistors onto a chip about the size of a fingernail. For scale or reference, a human hair is about 80 ,000 to 100 ,000 nanometers wide. We're talking sub one nanometer. Let's get to Micron. Micron's earnings and the memory environment are our top story. Right now, Micron's up 12%. It's on track for its biggest jump in a month. Earlier in the session, it had been much higher.

29:49Supply is tight. Prices will remain high. Bloomberg Intelligence writing, these earnings reflect AI-related demand, but don't quite capture the structural changes to the industry. Let's get out to Bloomberg intelligence analyst Jake Silverman. The headline there or the title, the memory upcycle for a few days now, you and I have been talking about, is this a massive departure from the memory market's historical norm? You seem to be writing now that it is. Yeah, it definitely is to many extent, to quite an extent, because in the past, what we've really seen is you see contracts on a monthly or quarterly basis.

30:27And so the fact that we're now seeing contracts extending out to 2030 in many cases, it just shows that there's a structural difference in the way that customers are thinking about procuring their memory. And a lot of this is just driven by the substantial price increases that we've seen. With memory probably increasing 200 to 300 percent this year for DRAM and NAND, the hyperscalers want to make sure that not only do they have the supply that they need, but they want to be able to make sure that they have a good idea of the range of pricing that they can expect as they're building out these AI data centers.

31:04Jake, I'm about to have a really important conversation on software. So we should probably remind the audience, like, what's happening in the background? And that is massive demand for memory chips in AI data centers, either for training or for running AI workloads. Just explain the bigger picture. Yeah. So when you're thinking about building out an AI data center, you need all of these GPUs. I think NVIDIA really, clearly the dominant player on training. They have 288 gigabytes of HBM per GPU in their NVL72 racks and whatever other rack configuration that they have. But actually, interestingly enough, you've seen Google with their TPU going up from 192 gigabytes to 216, 288 for different SKUs, Tranium clearly increasing the amount of HBM.

31:51So it's not just NVIDIA. It's the entire ecosystem just requires more HBM. And then we're not even getting into the system memory that you need, the LPDDR, the DDR that supports all sorts of different functions for AI demand. And that extends beyond training into inferencing, and we haven't even touched on agentic AI. And so if you start to see a proliferation or an inflection of a lot of these different AI tools, it's going to require memory as one of the foundational background enabling technologies. Bloomberg Intelligence's Jake Silverman with the React. Thank you very much indeed. Let's talk software.

32:27At its annual Config Conference in San Francisco, collaborative design firm Figma just unveiled a platform overhaul for the AI era, transforming its workspace into what it calls an intelligent canvas for full-stack digital creation. It allows teams to build animations, integrate AI agents, and write native code all in one place. Delighted to say that joining us is Figma. Co-founder and CEO, Dylan Field, back on the show. It's good to see you. Good to see you too. Thanks for having me. The idea is that you want your audience, which is developers, and also customers just to be able to do more in one place.

33:03Designers, yeah. Product designers and designers of all types, as well as those they work with. What's the breakthrough here? What have you done from the technology side that's allowed for that? Absolutely. So rather than having only vectors and images on the canvas, we've also added in all sorts of other things. For example, now you can have code layers where you're able to actually have a representation of code that's running and interactive on the canvas alongside your designer presentations. Plus, we've made it so that you can generate with the Figma agent plugins that let your team do reusable workflows, run skills.

33:42And we're very excited about the generative effects and shaders that we've added. Shaders lets you do advanced graphics work on the canvas. And finally, we unveiled Figma Motion. Figma Motion, I'm really excited about, and our community is honestly just over the moon. Is it something you were asked for? Sorry? Is it something you were asked for by the designers? They basically said, like, we want this, can you build it? Oh, since we've started, they've asked for that. What's the impetus for it? Yeah, so I think that if you zoom out, Right now we're in a place where AI is trained on in-distribution data.

34:22And the center of the distribution is your average. That's what it's trained on. And when you're prompting and you're getting outputs, it's so often that you're getting this average output. And people can smell that. They are almost, it's just like AI writing. You ever get sort of triggered and a little bit like, is that AI when you're reading something? I think it's attributable to, yes, because they're not all equal. Or just if you think something's been AI-ridden in the first place. And the same thing is true for design. I think that as people are trying to stand out with their businesses, be bold, have a point of view, that will be rewarded.

35:05And only humans can really raise the ceiling here. they can use AI to be more effective. But humans bring the point of view and they actually are able to use design as a differentiator to make it so that their product, their software, their business, their brand, their marketing, their advertising stands out, breaks through the noise in this increasingly wild attention economy we find ourselves in, which will only be more flooded by AI. That's quite a big picture of stuff. I mean, what I wanted to ask you was the technology underpinning all of this. If you remember back to OpenAI Dev Day 2025, you and I had a conversation and your stock was going up a lot because you got a name check on stage.

35:45Yeah, you told me that. And you were surprised by that. But in this case, let's take the coding layer, for example. Is it something you've built yourself or your model agnostic or coding platform agnostic to get to the net results? We've always taken a modular approach on what models we can use. And so we can swap models in, out, whenever we like on behalf of the user or at the user's request. And what we do is basically you can take your design and just move it over to a code layer. And it'll automatically convert it. You can then make that interactive. You can also, in the future, imagine a world where you're prototyping or even going to production with code in Figma.

36:25And by being part of that token flow, we're very excited about what that can mean for our users and their abilities to really impact the platform. because as code is commoditizing, what we're seeing is that the value is moving up the stack to design. Designers are the ones that we think in the future will be building all the software. Tokens equal revenues. As you know, a lot of your users watch the show, and I always try to get their input and what they'd ask you. I have one audience question, and I'm just going to read it to you. Is there any plan to make Figma a platform for brand integration using MCP?

36:58And so this person says, for instance, I may use a different application to build my website, etc., but my AI agent needs to access what he calls his ground truth, his own IP, his own branding, logos, artwork, etc. Not only that, but also we want to do even more when it comes to your digital asset production workflows. So as you're figuring out ways to create systems and workflows to do advertising, to do media generation, one of our bets is Weave. And Figma Weave is a platform that is able to compose models and workflows so that you can still have that human touch, that craft, and really shape the output of models like clay.

37:42And through that, you can get extraordinary results. You can then run those workflows through an API and pull them into whatever system you like. But we're very excited to be that system of record, not only for the brand assets and design system, but also for these workflows as well. Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field, back on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. Thank you. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals? At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for advisors and their clients to thrive. So what if you could? Paid advertisement investing involves risk, including potential asset principal.

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40:16Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business. It's the card that gives back all you put in. Learn more at chase.com forward slash reserve business. Chase for Business. Make more of what's yours. Accounts subject to credit approval. Restrictions and limitations apply. Cards are issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A., member FDIC. There's a new threat to tech stocks, and it's not what you'd expect. Public anger towards AI. Has Wall Street strategists warning it could spur anti-AI policies, creating another challenge for markets already grappling with a shaky rally in tech stocks, marked by both rapid growth but also sharp volatility?

40:55Boy, did we learn that lesson this morning. Bloomberg's Matthew Griffin has more, like, really interesting read. We've done a little bit more on the show in the past six to 12 months about the kind of PR crisis that AI is having with Americans at least. Now this is translating to the desks of Wall Street strategists who are saying something could happen as a result. Just explain the report. Well, Ed, thanks for having me on. And like you said, strategists are starting to tell their clients, pay attention to this polling data. Pay attention to what's happening at the local level. Because, again, Americans, they are very unhappy about the idea that AI might take their jobs.

41:36They're very unhappy at the prospect that data centers might be pushing up electricity prices. And what strategists think is there is a chance that's going at some point to translate into policy that slows the rate of the AI boom, slows profit growth for the hyperscalers, for the chip makers, you name it. Things like a pause on data center construction, and you look at a market where the number one question is, what's the return on this investment? That could be a pretty big risk eventually. So that's why I wanted to go next. Is this hardware related, like there is a ban on building data centers, or is the concern that there is some kind of heavy regulatory intervention on the software side?

42:16Well, if you look at sort of the worst case scenario that Wall Street's talking about, there is an example of each. One would be a national moratorium or pause on data center construction, and the other would be some kind of tax targeting big tech companies or targeting AI producers. Now, we have seen progressive politicians, members of Congress pushing for these policies already. We aren't there yet, but we are seeing them at the local and at the state levels. There are a bunch of cities and counties that have paused data center construction. There's actually a moratorium sitting on the governor's desk here in New York awaiting her signature or her veto.

42:56We've seen governors in Ohio and Illinois pausing tax breaks for data centers. So we're starting to see this kind of thing percolating. Bloomberg's Matthew Griffin with a really well-read story on the Bloomberg Terminal and.com. Thank you so much. Let's stay in the realm of the AI build-out. According to a new report, AI revenue may have reached a tipping point. Analysis from Exponential View shows global AI sales, excluding China, reached$25 billion in the first quarter of this year. Depreciation from data sender and chips investments, well, that's expected to be just$21 billion. So is the AI build out finally paying off?

43:36Azim Azhar, founder of Exponential View and an author on that report, as well as a Bloomberg contributor, joins us now. we've talked about this for so long. The machine where you know the numbers that are going in, capital expenditures. It's just been very hard to find the numbers that are coming out the other side. You seem to have found them. Well, thank you for having me on your show, Ed. And I thought it was really important that we do find them. The supply side is well understood. How many picks, shovels, chips, data centers are being built and how much does that cost? Piecing together what's happening on the demand side is much harder.

44:13The biggest AI companies are privately held. They don't need to disclose. And the hyperscalers, the big three, AI is only a small subsegment of a subsegment of their businesses. And so they don't really disclose. But there are enough clues. And for the last six months, my team and I have been looking at every public disclosure that we can up and down the supply chain from the hyperscalers, from well-sourced leaks to reconstruct the AI economy and to reconstruct specifically what is the top revenue coming in from customers, enterprises and consumers without any double counting. And that's what we published today.

44:53And that's the$25 billion in Q1 2026 that you referred to. And I think it's really critical. This lifts the fog of war. You can also look forward, right? So you're exactly right. I I mentioned a moment in time and that was that period gone. But if you looked, I guess, on an annualized revenue run rate basis, you can say per the report that actually there is continued growth, accelerating growth in those revenues too. Absolutely. I mean, we view the if you annualize the current month, we're at one hundred and seventy billion dollars of annualized revenues without any double counting. that represents a 200 % growth rate on the previous point, this time 12 months ago.

45:38But the current growth rate is still at around 200%. And what's really remarkable, Ed, is that you would expect that growth rate to start to slow down. And in fact, we were caught out by this because we had in our modelling from the start of this year predicted it would slow down. And what turned out to happen was that Anthropic went on a real tear and kept the growth rate high. we're just showing the chart that goes back to what i said at the top the point being quarterly revenue um pace and current number is now exceeding the depreciation on the hardware side um i'm assuming azim that you're a great student of history uh just as i am and what's so interesting is like you can go back and say well what happened at the advent of the smartphone or even uh of cloud computing the internet if you want where does does what's happening in ai on those real revenues stack up against those prior moments in technology history?

46:31Those moments are epic. They were some of the fastest growing business waves we've seen in the United States worldwide ever in history. AI real revenues is growing roughly three times faster than the internet grew, roughly three times faster than mobile grew. So this is a really fast in-demand product that enterprises across America and consumers around the world are really buying into at the moment. Azeem, real quick to end, what happens next? Well, what happens next is we see more of Main Street trying to get this right. We see more competition. I think people are concerned with the price of some of the proprietary models.

47:11We'll see large enterprises rotate towards open source, which provides better value for money. But I do think that as enterprises get better at doing this, as Main Street understands how to use AI, they will double down more. Azim Azhar, founder of Exponential View, a Bloomberg contributor. It's been really great to have you on Bloomberg Tech. Such command of the data. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Now, coming up on the show, Google's AI efforts have taken a hit with the departure of even more top talent. It's been a bit of a wave of late. We'll have the details next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

47:54It's time now for Talking Tech. I'm Yahaira Anand. First up, the AI boom is making its way onto NBA floors. Cloud infrastructure provider, Iren, is taking over the Golden State Warriors jersey patch starting next season. Betting the partnership will raise its profile in the Bay Area's booming AI ecosystem. The deal also makes Iren the team's official AI cloud partner. Plus, Anthropic is accusing Alibaba of using nearly 25 ,000 fake accounts to illicitly access its cloud AI model. In a letter to U.S. senators and White House officials, Anthropic called it the biggest effort yet by a Chinese company to piggyback on the work of leading U.S.

48:37AI labs. And Amazon is doubling down on India's AI boom, announcing another$13 billion to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in the country, including in Mumbai. The announcement comes as CEO Andy Jassy visits India, where he's meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. With a new investment, Amazon's total spending in India from 2010 through 2030 is expected to top$88 billion. Ed? Thank you, Yohaira. Two top AI researchers are leaving Google for Anthropic. These are just the latest departures in recent days, rattling Google's AI ambitions. Bloomberg's Google reporter, Julia Love, broke the story and joins us with the details.

49:20And the story was so impactful. It was shared across industry. Let's start with those kind of two key figures. Who are they and why it's being seen as such a blow to Google's AI efforts? Thank you, Ed. So the two senior researchers who are moving from Google to Anthropic are Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel. And both were viewed as key contributors to Gemini, which is Google's flagship AI model. And also highly regarded by their peers. Absolutely. Yes, yes. Their peers were sad to see them go. Jonas Adler was playing a key role in AI coding. and Alexander Pritzel was involved on the pre-training side, which is where models are kind of trained on large quantities of data.

50:05And I think especially following the news last week of Noam Shazir moving to OpenAI and John Jumper, a Nobel laureate, heading to Anthropoc, it has sparked concerns about who else may be on the way out. We've been talking about that on the show for that extended period of time, right? And it's played out in the stock. You know, Alphabet, the parent of Google, shares have been under pressure. What's the bigger picture? Like this is a mass wave of departures and so Gemini is in trouble or is it not as severe as that? To be clear, those two departures are the only names that we've reported on beyond John Gember and Norm Shazir.

50:43We're talking about a small number of people. However, the AI talent pool in terms of the number of people who really can move the needle on these models is relatively small. and so individual moves can matter, Google stresses, of course, that his bench of talent is very deep. Yes, thank you, and engage with us on that story. It was a very detailed report. Was there anything else in there that we haven't got to that you think the world needs to know about? We got a little bit more color about what happened around the time of Noam Shazir's departure. Computing power is a precious resource in Google.

51:20They have a lot of computing power, but they also have a lot of mouths to feed with cloud clients, research, their popular products. And so we learned that shortly before Noam Shazir announced his departure, the computing power for one of his projects was shifted to a larger pre-training team in London. It seems it was an attempt to boost collaboration, but we're still piecing it together, but compute can be very political within Google. Bloomberg Studio Love, who broke a big story, I highly recommend. you go and read it. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. This is what markets look like.

51:57Those are the stories. The Nasdaq 100 modestly higher, Micron, the most severely bullish outlook for memory in a supply constrained environment and prices high. And then Apple raising prices on some hardware because of that memory situation. Also recap the Qualcomm CEO conversation on the pod. You know where to find it. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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